The winter of 2006 was snowless until it unleashed one of the biggest snowstorms in the city’s history. It snowed all day and night. I woke the following morning in my apartment on Eleventh Street and traipsed to the café on the corner to have coffee and look at the snow. A man was shovelling just up the street. I heard him first, and then adjusted my position so I could see him. He moved at a deliberate, labored pace, clearing out a path in front of his stoop. Then something odd happened. A strained expression overtook his movements as he struggled with some opponent. What was happening, I saw, was that he had gone from merely shovelling snow to getting the ice off the pavement.

The business of ice removal is totally different than snow shovelling. Getting rid of ice brings out something wild and homicidal in people. It’s cathartic but in a different way altogether than shovelling snow, which, if you do it for pleasure as opposed to necessity, is kind of romantic. The sheer strenuousness of it is part of the romance, and the cleanness of the snow, and the fact that, unlike so many other things, shovelling is a task whose progress you can measure after every gesture.

I returned home, past the shovelling man, and found my upstairs neighbor altruistically shovelling snow out front. Our landlord was old. It was nice of my neighbor to clear the snow for him. But I knew he relished the shovelling. He was a hard-working architect, and in his free time he liked to build things or renovate his apartment—in other words, in his free time he liked to work. I greeted him warmly, hiding my disappointment. After I stood there for a while he let me have a few shovels.

I handed the shovel back to him and noticed that another guy had appeared a couple of houses down who had begun shovelling out his stoop. He wasn’t ancient, this guy, but on the older side, and like a mugger in reverse I saw an opportunity to get some shovelling action in the guise of philanthropy.

I approached. He wore a fedora, a leather jacket, and brand-new boots. They were special, high-tech snow boots. I imagined his excitement at getting them, his pride in his preparedness, only to be met with a long, snowless winter. And now, at last, snow! And the opportunity to swing into action with the new boots.

“Can I give you a hand?” I asked him.

“Oh, no thanks,” he said. “I’m having fun!”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

I walked back to my building. His stoop and my stoop were separated by another stoop, whose sidewalk was not in need of shovelling because the owners, when they did their renovation, had heated their sidewalk. When snow falls, it melts away. In the early days after they moved in, flush with excitement about the new toy, I suppose, they had the heat cranked up so high that whenever it rained, steam rose off the pavement.

I had just crossed this empty space, a kind of no-man’s-land of snowlessness, when the guy with the boots called after me.

“You could do some shovelling while I work on the ice,” he said.

I began to shovel while he went inside to get an ice chopper—a long pole with a flat blade at the end, all rusted and brown. He began to chop up the ice. I shovelled. But he couldn’t chop very fast or hard. He chipped away at the same spot without much penetration. Soon he was winded. He asked if I wanted to switch.

And here things got a little strange. I was so happy to have that chopper in my hands; I went at the ice as though it had personally offended me. My movements evolved quickly from vigorous to violent to kind of murderous. It was a savage attack. Every blow sent ice splinters flying. I chopped a line into the ice, and then a parallel line to that, and then a few across, like tic-tac-toe, and then pushed the pieces up off the ground, and then more savage chopping. I built up a sweat. I was panting, but I kept going.

The neighborhood was filled with people exploring. A pleasant “all bets are off” mood of festivity and lightness prevailed. People were pulling their children along on sleds and saucers; they were walking their dogs, most of whom seemed to be having a great time in the snow, and many of whom were outfitted in foot mittens which, come to think of it, had the same high-tech, lightweight look as the old guy’s boots. People took pictures of each other standing in the middle of the street.

And yet there I was chopping like a savage! There was some parallel between what I was doing and the sight of a person throwing themselves into the task of household cleanliness with a passion that seems a tad over the top. What was the metaphor here? The need to uncover, to break through the cold surface? Or some primal aversion to ice in front of the cave. No, I thought, it’s me. I just want to beat on something.

Finally, after only about ten minutes, the ice massacre was over. The sidewalk in front of his place was mostly clear. In this snow-and-ice eradication effort, it’s a question of where you draw the line. He had a good ten square feet of sidewalk that reached all the way to the dry aridity of the heated sidewalk. But on the other side, the ice stretched out down Eleventh Street.

I thanked the old guy, and he thanked me, and I walked away unburdened but also a little mortified at the intensity of my attack. What had I needed to expunge? It had seemed like such a peaceful day.

Panting and relieved of some burden, I passed a man going in the opposite direction. He was around my age, and in keeping with the day’s communal spirit we actually nodded and smiled. I took a few more steps and then I turned to glance at the work I had done. The guy was passing the old man with the chopper, who was surveying the scene, probably in no rush to get out of his boots. They greeted each other, the younger man moved on, but all of a sudden he stopped and turned around.

With a smile that indicated altruism and brotherly good will, but had within it, I knew, the needs of a killer, he said, “Excuse me, sir, do you need a hand?”